Voice of the people (letter).

Help Hospices

CHICAGO — As you continue to cover medical topics, including the topic of physicians who find it difficult to tell patients they are dying, I'd like to discuss an important element--the role hospice workers perform in breaking the silence.

Hospice workers are the medical profession's only specialists in delivering the news about terminal illness to patients and families. Nearly one-half of the 25,000 patients admitted to our hospice program each year have not been told that they are terminally ill. The task of breaking the news falls to us.

We do not shrink from this task, nor do we blame others for leaving it to us. Explaining the situation is the first step in managing a terminal illness. It is part of hospice's service.

Those patients would benefit, however, if physicians and others could bring themselves to refer terminal patients to hospices earlier in the course of their disease. Our experience, with more than 110,000 terminal cases behind us, is that more than 50 percent of our patients die within 19 days of entering the program. Ten percent of those referred to us die before we can admit them.

Clearly, too many health care professionals are waiting too long to refer the terminally ill to hospice, or never refer them at all.